There is much fervor over Illegal Immigration and how "those people" are not paying taxes, using "free" resources such as health care, and a myriad of other problems. Some of it comes from racism, although the term racism is sometimes used in place of the proper term of foreigner, but much of it comes from a perception that these individuals are getting benefits without paying taxes.
In reality it is those of us here legally, citizens and legal residents, that reap the benefit from Illegal Aliens through their hard efforts allowing the delivery of produce and other products and services to us at relatively inexpensive rates. Yes, these are overall a very hard working group of individuals who for all their effort receive little recognition, in fact receive just the opposite.
Minimum Wage laws are one of the key instruments that have created the demand for the less expensive labor necessary to deliver certain domestically produced products and services to American and foreign homes at globally competitive rates. By creating an artificial bottom threshold cost for employing legal workers the government has created a void between market rates and the cost of production.
To fill this void there are a few alternatives:
One way to fill the void and allow companies to continue to render some profit is to hire labor at rates that which meet the market. This labor rate falls below the mandated Minimum Wage and soon to be adherent benefit costs, but due to local technologies falls above wages paid in labor surplus countries. Since there is no legal way to provide health care insurance and other human services to this labor force we subsidize it through a marginal subsidy. In this case the labor cost stays attached, for the most part, to the product or service produced.
Another way to fill the void between market rate and production cost is for the government (taxpayers) to provide subsidies to those industries whose legal labor and benefit costs would exceed market rates. Those subsidies being much larger than the marginal cost to provide basic human services as they would need to make up the difference between the market cost of labor and the Minimum Wage rates.
The other possibility is by enforcement you remove the lower cost workers and remove the government subsidies. In this scenario the industries, even farming, would fail or move outside the country where the owners can eek out a reasonable return on their investment.
I suppose the last option available to government would be to nationalize the failing companies into some sort of collective, but I doubt many people would buy into it... ooops.
It is my position that Minimum Wage laws create the need for an illegal worker force and should be removed. There are some that say that Americans would not take these jobs because they are better than what is in many cases hard manual labor. I believe otherwise as their are many Americans who believe and are part of the legendary American hard work ethic. We should also foster immigration of those who want to become part of that ethic.
Does anyone want to hear why Minimum Wage laws foster unemployment?
